In previous posts on The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blog, Berkeley’s David Patterson, Intel’s Andrew Chien, and Microsoft’s Dan Reed presented their views on why research advances are needed to overcome the problems posed by multicore processors. In this piece — the fourth (and possibly final) entry in the series -– Marc Snir from UIUC argues that there are major challenges facing us but yet, the sky is not falling.

“Parallel programming, as currently practiced, is hard: Programs, especially shared memory programs, are prone to subtle, hard-to-find synchronization bugs and parallel performance is elusive. One can reach two possible conclusions from this situation: It is possible that parallel programming is inherently hard, in which case, indeed the sky is falling. An alternative view is that, intrinsically, parallel programming is not significantly harder than sequential programming; rather, it is hampered by the lack of adequate languages, tools and architectures. In this alternative view, different practices, supported by the right infrastructure, can make parallel programming prevalent.”

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